Best Landing Page Plugins

If you’re anything like me, you have spent hundreds hours building links to get traffic from organic search, you’ve created Facebook ads, Instagram ads and maybe even adwords.

You might even be slowly and surely building an email list with exactly the right people to buy what you’re selling.

But, instead of working harder to get more traffic. Maybe your next step is to do more with the traffic you already have.

This is where landing pages come in.

Let’s do the maths:

Say you’re currently getting 5,000 visitors per month with a 2% conversion rate.

It’s a lot easier to get that conversion rate from 2% to 4% that it is to get increase the traffic from 5,000 to 10,000 (what you would need to increase the revenue by the same amount if conversion rates stayed the same).

Landing pages are standalone web pages, designed with a single task in mind – get the user to convert.

This could be anything from signing up to a mailing list, submitting a call-back request or actually parting with cash there and then by purchasing a product.

But, the question is, what’s the best WordPress plugin for building landing pages?

Let’s find out.

What Are We Looking For In A Landing Page Plugin?

1. Independence From WordPress

Independence from WordPress = remove all WordPress features from the page.

Well, we want a landing page to be ‘on-brand’, it also needs to be independent from WordPress and your theme.

This is because the entire point of the landing page is to get people to convert. This is usually in the form of signing up for the mailing list.

To achieve as high a conversion rate as possible, we want to minimize the clutter or options we put in front of the user.

This means, no menus, sidebars, headers, footers or all the other junk we have on our sites.

What we want

​​​Remove all WordPress elements from the landing page

2. Elements/ Building Blocks

Elements/ Building Blocks = a set of pre-built options to create the landing page.

All of the plugins we feature work in more or less the same way.

There are a bunch of elements, and each page is made up of a combination of these elements.

It may be tables, image grids, forms, lead boxes, testimonials or countdown timers.

We’re looking for a plugin that has a lot of options in terms of what the elements look like, how much we can customize them and what they are capable of.

It must also be easy to build the page from these elements. This means a drag and drop page builder.

What we want

An extensive collection of elements to build landing pages from

3. Templates

Templates = a selection of pre-built landing pages that are proven to convert.

In internet marketing, everybody copies everybody else. Apologies if I sound a little cynical but there’s at least a degree of truth to this.

But the reason is a little bit more innocent than I’m making it sound – why reinvent the wheel?

Rather than starting from scratch, there are people out there who know what they’re doing who have built landing page templates.

It would be a shame not to use them. Almost criminal.

We want a landing page plugin that has an extensive library of templates which cover all different scenarios and objectives.

Qards is completely independent from WordPress. When you install the plugin you’re literally working from a blank canvas. That is, unless you use a template.

Looking at some of the templates and some of the examples of landing pages that have been created in Qards, I have to say, they look great. There’s also a marketplace that allows you to purchase additional templates or design elements to use within your landing page.

The plugin is easy to use and extremely stylish. Maybe it’s a little style over substance in places.

In fact, in terms of usability, it reminds me a little bit of using Wix.

When it comes to the elements available to build your landing page, Qards has:

This is by no means perfect. It costs time and energy to set this up but at least they are aware it’s an issue, and providing some kind of solution.

Finally, the price. Qards will set you back $99 for a single site license. This is a one off fee rather than a year long subscription.

Overall, I like Qards as an option. It does most of what we’re looking for in a landing page plugin and does it with a bit of panache.

The doubts I have come with the lead capture ability, the ecosystem and the integration with email tools. It seems as though the only integration that is available is with Mailchimp. This just isn’t quite enough.

LeadPages

LeadPages is the standard bearer for landing pages. It’s the plugin we all know.

Is it so popular because it’s a big name or is it popular because it actually delivers?

Let’s start with the independence from WordPress. Leadpages allows you to create a completely independent landing page that does not pull in menus, widgets, sidebars or any of the other clutter that comes with WordPress.

When it comes to the elements that are available, it is quite comprehensive. There are:

​Countdowns

Forms

Progress bars

Lead capture forms

Once you know what the LeadPages lightboxes look like for capturing leads, you will notice them everywhere.

While I’m no designer, I think some of them look pretty great. These can be filtered by industry (e.g. ecommerce, photography, travel) or by campaign type (checkout page, coming soon page, sales page).

Interestingly, you can sort the templates by conversion rate. LeadPages obviously collects conversion data on the landing page templates that have been used and feeds this back.

However, I would take these conversion rates with a pinch of salt.

Remember, these are just templates. People edit them heavily with their own layout, text, images and just about everything else you can think of.

This links to our next point – A/B testing is included as part of LeadPages.

This allows you to tweak elements for maximum conversion using data rather than gut feeling.

So far, so good. The final piece of the puzzle is the price. This is where LeadPages stumbles in my eyes.

The cheapest plan will set you back $25 per month but this does not include A/B testing. If you want that, you will have to purchase the $48 per month package.

One point to note is that these prices are for when you purchase annually. If you want to pay monthly, these prices jump to $37 and $79 per month respectively.

At this point, LeadPages is looking pretty expensive.

It’s a shame such a good product is so expensive. But, if people are willing to pay it then you can’t blame LeadPages for charging it.

It’s a good product and they have the advantage that landing pages can show a direct ROI. This makes it a lot easier for marketers to justify the spend to their boss or even just in their own heads.

Thrive Architect

Thrive Architect is not a landing page tool per se. It’s a site builder but it can be used in isolation as a landing page tool if you don’t want to use it across the whole site.

It’s on this list because the Thrive eco-system is built for conversions. They have:

Thrive Architect to build pages

Thrive Ovation for testimonials

Thrive Leads to capture email addresses.

Each tool on its own performs well, but when you combine the three they start to become really effective.

But back to Architect.

Firstly, it’s possible to start with a completely blank page in Thrive Architect. We actually built our sales page using it.

It’s clean. No navigation. No header. No footer.

The user can either buy or leave. There are no distractions.

Thrive Architect is designed to build entire sites rather than just landing pages so it has all that you would need for a landing page plugin plus more.

As I mentioned earlier, these are just the basic building blocks. Once you add Thrive ovation – in my opinion the best testimonial plugin out there – and Thrive Leads, it becomes a formidable offering purely focused on driving conversions.

There are no templates in Thrive Architect, but there are templates in Thrive Leads.

Don’t get confused through. The templates in Thrive Leads are for pop-ups and lightboxes, not landing pages.

A Thrive membership will cost $19 per month if paid annually or $30 per month if paid quarterly.

Overall, I like the Thrive membership option. It’s especially useful if you’re going to use Thrive Architect as the page builder for your entire site. If you don’t do this, it starts to look a little bit pricey.

Just remember to relate your spend back to your ROI. If you’re selling a big ticket item, one additional sale per month might cover your costs. Then it’s a no-brainer.

WP Landing Pages

WordPress Landing Pages was designed with inbound marketing in mind. The whole point of the plugin is ‘to convert more of your passive website visitors into active leads or email list subscribers.’

The creators say WP Landing Pages functions as a standalone plugin but it ties in well with some of their other plugins – WordPress Calls To Action and WordPress Leads – to provide additional functionality.

This is promising. It seems to be an ecosystem like Thrive.

However, this is about as positive as I can be with WP Landing Pages. It is just so basic.

To being with, you don’t get live previews of your changes. In order to see your changes, you need to press the ‘Update All’ button, wait a few seconds while it spins away, loading up the changes and see what they look like.

It is just unusable.

There are very few elements. There are no templates. There’s no A/B testing.

The only redeeming feature is that it is free. To be fair though, you’d have to be pretty brazen to try and charge for this plugin.

If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative than these two, Qards is credible but it doesn’t do everything that you would want it to do. And, when you look at what it does do, it doesn’t do it quite as well as Thrive Architect or Leadpages.

So, to sum up: it’s a toss up between LeadPages and Thrive Membership.

If you can afford it get LeadPages.

If you are going to build your entire site, get the Thrive Membership.

Hey, I'm Danny! I write full-time for Authority Hacker. I came from a background of more traditional marketing before I started work for a large affiliate marketing site a couple of years ago. Now I travel the world, write, market and watch sports!